devblog / friday 040222 (Patreon)

Unpack your guillotines, friends, it’s getting hairy out there. Another week of (barely) managed democracy and the grim fascination of watching the slow motion collapse of the twentieth century. It hung on a couple of decades longer than anybody thought, but perhaps it is finally time to let go? And now it turns out that not even the oil companies are our allies in the battle for the future! Who knew. It is presumably only a matter of time before tech visionary Matt Hancock, bravely stepping back into the rough and tumble of frontline politics and beautifully poised for a hilarious leadership bid, announces that the only way we’ll all make it through the remains of winter is with mandatory graphics cards for each and every home, all of us furiously mining bitcoin to keep warm.

THIS WEEK

- The Wreckage Systems Technical Overview (video version) is complete! It will be premiering on Monday. Set your clocks/await the email. The written version - more nerdy, much longer - is still not quite finished. It will be posted alongside the video on Monday if we find time to wrap it up before then, or it might have to follow a few days later. Let’s see.

- Thanks to a tip-off in our Discord back channel, a couple of bugs were found in the V2 stream. And here was us thinking it was feature complete. Bug #1 was that the .txt log had not been updating since the latest version went online a couple of weeks ago. That has been fixed as of this morning. Bug #2 is that the ’Squall’ system has not been appearing. This is mysterious, and since the .txt log was also broken it is hard to ascertain whether any other systems might be missing. A cursory check of things this week has not found an answer to this. We will be delving deeper, and resisting the urge to add more systems since the number 65 is so neat and tidy. [LAST MINUTE UPDATE: We have *probably* found and fixed the reason that Squall was not appearing and, if it was that reason, then Squall will have been the only system affected. So stay tuned to the stream to enjoy some reverb-soaked free-jazz calamity as and when it re-emerges]

- Outside of 65LABS, you might be interested to know that 65daysofstatic, all in the same room at the same time, spontaneously decided to try and play Await Rescue for the first time in approximately one decade. Just to see what would happen. In hindsight, we should have live-streamed it. It would have been funny enough content to be worth this month’s sub all by itself. Suffice to say, it’ll need a little more work if we’re ever going to bring that back into rotation.

- This, by the way, was early rehearsals for the spring Russia shows. Which, subject to the pandemic and a whole new flavour of saber-rattling geopolitics, we very much hope will actually happen this time.

- Here’s some GIFs of the finished Wreckage Systems Technical Overview to further whet your appetite.

  • Wreckage Control:

• Wreckage System Audio Module:

• System 60:

• A Constellation Heart:

THINGS TO COME

- MONDAY: The Wreckage Systems Technical Overview (Video version) will drop in the a.m!

- We had planned to schedule some kind of live Q&A for next week, but want to make sure the full Technical Overview has been posted before that happens. It will probably take place on the Discord anyways, so we might play it by ear. If you haven't joined there yet, but feel like you might be inclined to, why not hop over and say hello now? If you hook up your Patreon account to your Discord account in the settings, then you'll automatically be added to the 65LABS back channel, and there tends to be a flurry of activity Friday afternoons when the dev blog drops.

That's all for now, friends. Until next week: wrap up warm, remember to not champion any Tories with year's long records of being-a-Tory just because they're righteously jumping ship now, and if you happen to have the power to dismantle any outdated legacy institutions or help the new world that is struggling to be born actually be born, then please go right ahead and do that.